ATI's New High End and Mid Range: Radeon X1950 XTX & X1900 XT 256MB

Quake 4 Performance

There has always been a lot of debate in the community surrounding pure timedemo benchmarking. We have opted to stick with the timedemo test rather than the nettimedemo option for benchmarking Quake 4. To be clear, this means our test results focus mostly on the capability of each graphics card to render frames generated by Quake 4. The frame rates we see here don't directly translate into what one would experience during game play.

Additionally, Quake 4 limits frame rate to 60 fps during gameplay whether or not VSync is enabled. Performance characteristics of a timedemo do not reflect actual gameplay. So why do we do them? Because the questions we are trying to answer have only to do with the graphics subsystem. We want to know what graphics card is better at rendering Quake 4 frames. Any graphics card that does better at rendering Quake 4 frames will play Quake 4 better than other slower cards. While that doesn't mean the end user will see higher performance in the game, it does mean that the potential for seeing more performance is there, for instance if the user upgrades a CPU before the next graphics card upgrade.

Timedemos do walk a fine line between synthetic benchmarks and real world benchmarks. While we tend to favor real world data here at AnandTech, this type of benchmark is very capable of using a real world data set to test the maximum capabilities of the graphics cards under its particular work load without bottlenecking at other points in the system. To be sure, even timedemos can see memory and CPU bottlenecks, as data must be transfered to the graphics card some how. But this impact is much lower than the impact of running AI, physics, script management, I/O, and other game code at the same time.

What this means to the end user is that in-game performance will almost always be lower than timedemo performance. It also means that graphics cards that do slightly better than other graphics cards will not always show a tangible performance increase on an end user's system. As long as we keep these things in mind, we can make informed conclusions based on the data we collect.

Our benchmark consists of the first few minutes of the first level. This includes both inside and outdoor sections, with the initial few fire fights. We test the game with Ultra Quality settings, and we enable all the advanced graphics options except for VSync and antialiasing. Anisotropic filtering is manually set to 8x. Id does a pretty good job of keeping framerate very consistent; in-game framerates of 25 are acceptable. While we don't have the ability to make a direct mapping to what that means in the timedemo test, our experience indicates that a timedemo fps of about 35 translates into an enjoyable experience on our system. This will certainly vary on other systems, so take it with a grain of salt. But the important thing to remember is that this is more of a test of relative performance of graphics cards when it comes to rendering Quake 4 frames -- it doesn't directly translate to Quake 4 experience.

The Doom 3 engine was once NVIDIA's stomping grounds, but Quake 4 performance is now dominated by ATI's Radeon X1900 and X1950 series. The X1950 CrossFire manages a 26% performance advantage over the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI, while the X1900 CF setup pulls ahead by just under 16%.

Among single cards, the X1950 XTX manages about an 11% performance advantage over the 7900 GTX, meaning that CrossFire actually scales much better than SLI in Quake 4 for some reason. The new 256MB X1900 XT is outperformed by its 512MB sibling by a decent 16%. Honestly we were not expecting to see such big differences, especially with AA disabled, between the 256MB and 512MB cards. It's good to see that games are actually using all of this framebuffer being thrown at them.

With AA enabled, ATI does even better, with the X1950 CrossFire outperforming the 7900 GTX SLI by over 57%. ATI has done a lot of work on its OpenGL performance lately and we're currently investigating to see if that's the cause for such a stellar showing in Quake 4 here today.